AI is making hotel marketing sound the same
In part one I made the case that AI-generated content can become a trust problem. This time I'm getting into the other danger, sameness, and where AI genuinely helps.
AI rewards consensus
AI tends to reward consensus. Anyone can open up the tools and use similar prompts, and it's getting very easy to spot AI-generated content. If any person at your property can ask an AI chat for a full year of content around your upcoming events, so can every other hotel in your comp set. They have the same holidays, the same seasonality, the same events and the same market. Marketing is intended to make you stand out from the crowd.
Think of the Coca-Cola polar bears. A polar bear has absolutely nothing to do with Coca-Cola, yet those holiday commercials have become synonymous with Coke. It worked because it was unique. Great brands are built around specificity.
Put AI captions in your own voice
We create many marketing calendars at Revpar Media, so we use AI for captions. My advice is to use them as a guideline, then put the caption in your own brand voice.
I've used an example of two boutique properties, one in New York and one in LA. Both posted a picture of their front door. The New York caption simply said the hotel was camera ready, which gives nothing to the audience. The Los Angeles caption invited people to come join them for breakfast every morning, gave the dates and hours, and said "We're here to welcome you." That one gives the viewer a reason to check the link in bio and find out more.
One simple test: if five hundred other hotels could post the same thing you're posting now, it's probably doing little for your brand. You're feeding into the sameness of what's out there.
Give AI the mechanical work
Efficiency by itself is not differentiation. The tasks AI is best used for on a marketing team are research, brainstorming, analysis, transcribing, editing and repurposing. Use it to eliminate the mechanical work of marketing. The human element is what makes your marketing worth paying attention to.
Back in my revenue management days, I managed a branded property with an ADR of roughly $220 annually. One Saturday night I couldn't set the rate high enough. I took it close to four hundred dollars a night and we continued to sell rooms. There were no major events on our event calendar that we knew about. We eventually found out through word of mouth that there was a Bigfoot convention at the convention center. You can ask AI for the full list of events that would bring 50 plus people into an area. Had we done that, we could have raised those rates earlier in the booking window.
Small budgets, plenty of stories
A lot of our prospects tell me they don't have a large content budget, so they use AI to produce their content. My answer is that hotels have a shortage of noticing. Every hotel contains stories every day. Interview your best front desk agent or the doorman who's been there for 20 years, and guests have a friendly face to look for when they check in.
One of our clients is a select service property in Orlando. We posted about the laundry room on property, and it was our top post for about six months running. A guest coming to Disney with the kids knows the clothes are going to get dirty. Laundry is literally soap and water, and it was important for that audience to know.
Tell clients when you use AI
Instagram now flags AI-generated posts. If an agency is delivering you AI-generated work, you deserve to know what you're paying for. Last week I suggested to one of our clients that we use AI to put some flowers in the corner of a photo, to give it more color. They liked it. If your partners aren't divulging that to you, I would look at that as a red flag.
Before anything goes live, ask whether you're still accurately representing the property. If you don't have a pool, don't have AI create something saying you have a pool.
Real moments will stand out
As synthetic content becomes unlimited, authenticity becomes scarce, and scarcity creates value. One of our New York City properties initially gave us some pushback about a reel with the real neighborhood audio. You heard cars passing by, some construction noise, a couple of taxis honking and birds in the park. The piece of content performed very well. When guests get out of the subway and walk toward that hotel, that's what they're going to hear.
We go through all of this in the full episode. Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Calvin and the Revpar Media team build hotel marketing that drives bookings, from social media management to influencer campaigns.
Book a 30-minute callFull transcript
Calvin Tilokee In the episode, I made the case that AI generated content isn't just a creative problem, it can become a trust problem. But that leaves the practical question, if we're not supposed to hand the brand over to AI, where should we use it? In part two, I'm getting into the other danger, sameness. We'll talk about where AI genuinely helps, what smaller hotels can create without huge budgets, what agencies owe their clients, and why made by humans may soon become a brand signal.
Let's get into it. So what we want to discuss today is what's the bigger problem? Is it that AI content can become deceptive, or is it that it's making brands sound all the same? What does a brand lose when efficiency removes the quirks, imperfections, and the point of view that makes it unique? So one thing we want to note is that AI tends to reward consensus. Anyone can open up tools and use them. They can use similar prompts, and most people are not creative enough.
Uh we haven't it hasn't advanced enough to where people are differentiating. It's getting very easy to spot what AI-generated content is as you scroll through your social media feeds. So you don't want to align your brand with something that's becoming generic and easy to spot and most of Most importantly, inauthentic. Great brands about great brands are built around specificity. They give the person, the user, a feeling that this thing is made for them.
When you're creating content, when you're doing any sort of marketing, the things you want to think about are what are these people seeing? What are they going to feel when they see this content? And think of your favorite commercial, whether it be from the most recent Super Bowl. Or anything that you've seen on TV. Um the one that jumps to my mind is the Coca-Cola uh polar bears. What does a polar bear have to do with Coca-Cola? Absolutely nothing.
But every holiday season here in America, we're bombarded with these with these commercials and they've become synonymous with the holidays. They've become synonymous with Coke. We see a polar bear with a red scarf and we immediately think Coke. Why did it work? Because it was it's unique. It put Whether it's because they put two things together that don't necessarily go together, yeah, polar bear and a soda, but it wasn't the same old thing that you're seeing all the time.
And that's where AI is taking us. If any person at your property can just open up an AI chat and create a full year worth of content, a month, uh a quarter, 90 days, hey, these are the events that we have coming up in the hotel. Please create social media strategy around this. Guess what? Every other hotel in your comp set is going after the same holidays. They have the same seasonality, the same events, the same market. Their guests are likely coming from the same place.
So if all you're doing is putting in generic prompts around the generic items about your hotel, anyone can do this and you no longer stand out. Marketing is intended to make you stand out from the crowd, not fit into it. Another thing that you want to t uh think about as well is the is the jargon and the overuse of marketing buzzwords. Um and AI will create social media captions for you. Um you can easily put in, here's a picture, please help me create a caption.
What you wanna do, my advice would be use those as a guideline. And listen, we we we create many, many marketing calendars here at Revpar Media. So we have tons of clients And sitting there and trying to create a caption for every individual post for every calendar for every client for every month is a lot. So we use AI. As I said in part one, I don't want this to become, we're not bashing AI, but how do we use it as a tool without letting it overpower your marketing and your uniqueness?
Um, so use it to help you create captions, but then make this stand out in your own brand voice, use it as a trigger to inspire you when you get that writer's block. Hey, we have Halloween coming up. Here's a post about Halloween, uh, or here's here's a picture of the pumpkins in the lobby. Help me create a caption and it's going to spit out a caption. It may be different from the hotel down the street slightly, but make it sound like you. Put it in your own brand voice.
How would if you were creating this uh social media caption on your own, what would it sound like? What does your what are you hoping the guest thinks, feels when they see this post. That's how you want to write this caption. And your brand memory comes from the little quirks and unique things about your property and and about your your voice in particular. Writing in a way um that invites your audience into the hotel. One example that I've I've given in the past, uh there's two very distinct properties, both have Very good, um, they're very similar, both boutique properties, lifestyle forward, one is in New York, one is in LA, and they both have very strong women's history uh about the buildings.
Now, I d I use this example in in a talk that I gave a couple years ago about how to bring your guest into the hotel, how to use your social media feed as an invitation for your guest to. Join you, welcome you, that hand that's extending uh and reaching out and drawing your your guest and your customer into the hotel. So one hotel, the one in New York, puts a picture of their front door and simply says, blank hotel is camera ready. Totally fine caption, I guess.
Not sure what we're trying to evoke. What what does that do for the viewer? Uh is this okay, we're pretty hotel. Maybe, maybe not. Pretty subjective. Um, okay, that's one way to approach it. We found a very similar, very similar post from the hotel in Los Angeles. Same picture of the front of the door. However, their caption says, Come join us for breakfast every morning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here are the dates and hours. We're here to welcome you.
Which hotel is executing, which which one evokes a feeling? Now, maybe we're camera ready evokes a feeling, but I doubt it. That doesn't give anything to the audience. That's talking about me. Let's talk about us as the hotel. Your feed and your content is for your audience. You want them to feel something. You want them to be inspired when they see that post to engage with it, first and foremost, and potentially click on your website link and find out more about the hotel.
You want them to feel something. So the second example, the hotel in Los Angeles, gives that audience and gives the person seeing it an opportunity to feel something. Wow, this hotel is pretty, but yeah, I didn't know they had a restaurant. Let me go find out more. Let me go in their link in bio and and and check it out. What does it what does what does it look like? Let me scroll through the feed and see if they have pictures of either the restaurant or the food.
Now every audience member, every person who sees that may not do that, but your chances are a lot higher when you present it in a way that's authentic and engaging for the person seeing it, not for the person posting it. Use this simple test. Could five hundred other hotels post the same thing you're posting now? If yes, this is probably not elevating your brand. You're just feeding into the sameness of of what's out there. And I don't need to tell you if you're viewing this and you're someone who's a decision maker in the hospitality industry, you've got a lot of competition.
There's a lot of hotels in your market. There's lot of hotels in your city and not enough guests to go around. We don't need to be posting the same thing as everyone else. What you need to be doing is posting things that are unique, engaging, and speak in your brand voice. So lastly on on this point, you wanna use AI to be efficient. Efficient uh you wanna use AI to be efficient. Efficiency should help your production, but efficiency by itself is not differentiation.
So there are a few ways where AI genuinely can make your marketing team better. So there are a few tasks that you can give an AI generated um there are a few tasks that you can give to your AI of choice to help you. Research, brainstorming, analysis, transcribing, editing, repurposing. These responsibilities are is what AI is best used for as a marketing team. Ultimately, what you want to do is use AI to eliminate the mechanical work of marketing, not the human element of it.
The human element is what is going to make your marketing worth paying attention to. So great uses for AI, research, competitive scans. See if your your comp set has posted anything similar to what you're thinking about posting. Think look at it as when did they post the thing you're you're thinking of posting about? Are you ahead of the game or did they post about this three weeks ago? Um, maybe they posted that too early. Use AI to scroll your your comp set and and these other tools, these other uh excuse me, use you use AI to scroll your comp set and the other hotels in your area to see what they're doing.
And maybe you wanna you wanna embrace some of what they're doing or you realize We're going to take a different angle and that's going to help us be unique and stand out. But you won't know that unless you're paying attention. And AI can help you do that very quickly. Um utilize AI for brainstorming. Uh thinking about what your your content up what your upcoming content calendar should be. Are are you thinking about the holidays are coming up, Thanksgiving, of course, everybody's uh gonna be posting about that?
What are some maybe off the beaten path events in your area? that that you could talk about? What are some SEO friendly terms and events, maybe things people are coming into your area that you may not even know about? I can give you an example of a hotel I was managing back in my revenue management days where we had a Saturday night and I couldn't set these rates high enough. Every time I bumped it up to twenty, thirty bucks, I'd sell. I'd sell a bunch of rooms overnight.
So for example, this hotel was a a branded property with an ADR roughly $220 annually. Um, and we would track it. One way I like to track my revenue management was how many rooms do we need to sell out sell per day before this date in order to hit the forecast or the budget or sell out. And let's just say for example, I think it was three rooms a night we needed to sell from here on out in order to get to our our goal. Come in one morning, five rooms sold, bump it up twenty bucks.
Come in the next day, six rooms sold, bump it up another thirty. I kept taking this rate close to four hundred dollars a night, and we continued to sell rooms. And we couldn't for the life of us understand why, what was going on. There were no major events on our event calendar that we knew about. We spoke to people at the property, boots on the ground, they didn't know. Come to find out through word of mouth eventually that there was Bigfoot convention happening in the city at the convention center.
And this is not something that made it onto any event calendar. It wasn't something that people knew about, but clearly there was demand for it. So these are the type of things that AI can help you with as you're seeing this sort of increase in your in your sales or anything like that. Or even before that, hey, AI of choice for the for November, December, working on our social media calendar. Is there any what are the full list of events that would bring 50 plus people into it into an area?
Uh and have it help you with that with those sort of things. And then now you could have been, in hindsight, had we done something like that, we could have been posting about the Bigfoot convention and saying, hey, we're the place to stay during this, and we could have raised those rates earlier, built up the ADR earlier in the booking window. So that's just an example. Of how to use the tool to your benefit. Another great way to use the AI another great way to use the AI tools is to repurpose long form format into shorter clips.
Um, this podcast, uh, for example, once this is released, we're gonna use this to use AI to generate some shorter form clips that we're gonna be able to share on our social media, in our blogs, uh with clients, things like that. Um and there's a way to do that. So I don't have to sit here or no one on my team has to sit here and edit edit video. That takes a long time. There's tools for that. So these are these are ways that you can use this. If you have a video of your holiday party from last year, did you have um pumpkin spice lattes in your in your lobby, apple cider, apple picking, any events, noteworthy events um that are fall?
Did people come trick-or-treat in your lobby last year? You have that video, you can put it up into AI, have it create two to three short clips And now you have content that you can put into your feed that is going to be authentic because it was filmed in your lobby, in your area, in your space, and you didn't have to sit here and edit that or didn't have to pay somebody to spend the time to edit a video. But behind everything, you want to keep the truth of the story human.
The facts, the lived experiences, for example, the trick-or-treating example in in hotel lobbies or Thanksgiving. Maybe you have a Thanksgiving dinner at your property. Um, some of our hotels do different kid and family friendly events around Thanksgiving for people that are staying at the hotels during the holidays. Uh pin the tail on the turkey, things like that. Do you have video of those things? share that because it's not just the picture or it's not just a video of a kid pinning a tail or playing a game.
What what you're really telling the audience is your family is welcome here. They can now envision themselves and their children in that space having having a good time, um, being able to relax a bit. They can be entertained by things going on at the hotel while maybe mom and dad can sit and have an apple cider for a few minutes and not constantly have to take care of the kids. These are the thoughts and emotions that you want to evoke with things and AI can help you do all that sort of editing.
So again, we want to use it as a tool without losing sight of the fact that we're trying to reach real people. And you're not going to reach real people with fabricated content. So, one thing that I hear from a lot of our prospects and people out there in the industry is we don't have a large content budget. So we use AI to produce our content. So for those properties that don't have a large budget for marketing, um select service, extended stay type properties, we'll let's discuss some content that you can create and use to be authentic, be more polished without solely relying on AI generated content.
So my answer to that question when it's when it's raised is your hotels you don't have a shortage of content. You have a shortage of noticing. And they m that might sound like a hot take and inflammatory, but here's the thing your hotels, every single hotel contains stories every day. Staff, guests, your food, your design, your neighborhood, events, operational moments. There's nothing stopping you from interviewing your best front desk agent, your employee of the month, because these are some of the first people, your dorman, that's that's been there for 20 years.
These are the people that have the stories, they have the access to your guest. And what's great about that is if you can put these people front and center on the feed, that gives your audience, that gives someone to recognize when they approach the hotel. Um, you have you have a front desk agent that's that's been there for a while and maybe they've they've won a recent award, employer of the month, uh or or s something like that. Feature that because that gives your audience now a friendly face to look for.
When they check in, they can make that connection instantly. And again, you want to use your social media page as an extension of your property. This is the f first thing that people are going to see. Imagine it that way. Because I've been in this industry long enough to remember the phrase, oh, the front desk is the per first people to touch the guest. That is no longer true, and it hasn't been true for a long time. The first people to touch your guests is your website, your social media, where they find you.
Before they ever set foot in your hotel. They've already gone through your website, they've gone through your social media, your reviews, they've potentially called the hotel and spoke to reservations. They've had quite a few touch points before they get there, before they even make a decision to book your hotel, they've already touched quite a few people. So being able to put a face front and center on the property, maybe it's a short interview of this person.
Um maybe it's it's the general manager with a welcome note. Here's our property, here's what we're good at. We'll these are the people that stay here. We're welcome to have you. We're we're happy to have you, etc. Now when that person checks into the hotel and they see this face, they've they have that connection. That's what you want to use your marketing for to create that bridge. And any hotel can do that. Whether you've got a five star property with um around the clock room service or your a select service property next to the airport.
And here's an example of how that works. One of our clients is a select service property in Orlando and we simply posted about the fact that they had a laundry laundry room on property. And that was our top post for about six months running. Why? Because we knew the audience and that gave the audience something that they could relate to. I'm coming to Disney. Disney means I'm taking the kids um they're gonna want ice cream, they're gonna want food, the clothes are gonna get dirty.
Do I have to pack extra clothes because they're gonna be filthy? No, we've got laundry here. And that's not a sexy amenity by any stretch. It's literally soap and water. However, that was important and it was important for the audience to know. One of the m the mistakes that Select Service Hotels make is thinking that the person who's booking your select service hotel is a luxury guest. At times they may be a luxury guest, but if they're looking for your property, they want what you have to offer, whether it's the location, the convenience, the affordability, they're looking for what you have to offer.
So highlight your attributes in front of them and don't make the mistake of thinking, well, what we should do. Is have AI create us a whole bunch of images that make us look fancy so we'll attract that guest. That's not your guest. They're coming for you. So one thing that we get as well is people asking what responsibilities do agencies and marketing partners have to divulge the fact that they're using AI. Um and I step one is social media is doing that for you now.
So when you post Instagram, for example, you post something that's AI generated, it's gonna flag it right at the top where you typically have the location where you can add a location. Instagram is now telling the audience AI generated. So that has kind of already been taken care of for you. Um, but if you as an agency or if someone is delivering you AI generated work, they deserve to know what they're paying for. So there's a big difference between using AI to polish up a picture, um, doing some edits, changing the lighting and things like that, and then completely creating something uh fabricated.
There's a big difference between that. And I think if your agency partner, your marketing partners are not divulging the fact that, hey, we took this picture but we used AI to brush it up, what do you think? Or for example, one of our clients last week, we have some pictures that we don't love. And I suggested, hey, what if we used AI to maybe put some flowers in the corner to give it a little bit more life, a little bit more color and pop? Oh yeah, we like that.
That's an efficient way to use it, but you want to divulge that to the client. Um, the last thing you would want to do or at or as an end user, last thing you wouldn't w you wouldn't want to receive something thinking it's real and then post it and get negative feedback or get flagged for AI generated content when in fact you had no idea. So if your partners are not divulging that information to you, I would look at that as a red flag. So before you use any AI generated content, uh what should you ask yourself as a marketer or maybe your social media partners, your marketing partners, uh to determine whether or not this still feels like the brand?
So you wanna create a human first publish uh excuse me. You wanna create a human first pre-published checklist. So basically if you wouldn't feel comfortable putting AI info next to it, um, I probably wouldn't put my brand name next to it. Right? So kind of the example we just used in the last question with the hotel photo and adding some flowers into it. Um, are we still accurately representing the property? Is something you want to ask yourself.
And in that case, yes. We're not changing what the bed looks like. We're not changing the view outside of the window or anything like that. We're simply adding a little bit of color. to make the fo to make the photography look more presentable, to more accurately reflect what we want, uh we want that that feeling we want to evoke in the audience and to make it more visually pleasing because of course this is a visual game that we're playing. Um people are bombarded with all sorts of content when they get on their when they get on their feeds.
Um it needs to catch the eye first before they look past anything else. So that's how you want to use it. And those are the kind of checklists that questions you want to ask yourself. Are we still accurately representing our brand? Does this still look like the hotel? Does this still look like something we offer? Does this still accurately reflect the message we want to put out there? Um, and also is it is it yours? Is it unique to you? Um might be a s extreme and silly example, but if you don't have a pool, don't have AI create something saying you have a pool.
Right? Like don't post a picture that has a pool or rooftop if your hotel doesn't have that, or access to a highway, or any of these any any any amenity that you don't have, you don't want to put it out there. Um you wanna make it look or have the audience completely understand this could genuinely come from this brand, or could this be any competitor? And one thing you want to ask yourself, regardless whether this is AI or not, but just your marketing in general, when you're creating something, could this genuinely be any hotel in your comp set or is this unique to you?
And again, that goes back to the top of the conversation we were discussing. You want you wanna stand out. You don't wanna just be lost in a sea of content where anybody this could be any hotel. And AI is of course just scrolling everything that's out there and just creating an amalgam of what it finds. Um and if you're just simply reposting and just posting what's there, you're not you're not achieving that goal. Uh so that's something when you're looking at what goes live, these are the things you want to ask yourself, could this be anyone or is this unique to us?
And here's the last point we want to make as we wrap up today's show. Uh AI will become harder and harder to detect. Now, as I mentioned, social media platforms are flagging AI content, um, which is only gonna make authentic content more scarce. And being more scarce creates more value and more perception of quality. What should you as a hospitality brand do now to ensure that five years from now your audience still trusts you? So as synthetic content becomes more prevalent and becomes unlimited, authenticity becomes scarce.
And scarcity creates value. So if your content is genuine and authentic, it's going to stand out more and more. It already stands out. When people know when they feel something, when when they see it. When you post a piece of content and everyone here who's watching this who's done any sort of any sort of content creation, whether it be personal, for for a brand, for a hotel, when you create something that hits, you know it. And it's because people felt something when they saw it and and engage with it.
And you can't fake that. You just can't fake that. When Humans are just not going to be fooled that way. We we could try, but you also know when you're being lied to. Think about anything you do, whether you're buying a car or scrolling Instagram. It it doesn't matter. You know when people are being authentic. You know when something feels right. You get that tingle in your stomach when something is off. You also get those butterflies when they're right.
Um you feel something. And If more and more hotels are going towards creating things that are synthetic, the real content will stand out even more. This is similar to the very early days of social media, particularly Instagram, where if you were a professional photographer and you had a digital camera, that content stood out immediately because no one else had that. No one else could do that. And that meant you were luxurious. That meant you were fancy.
That meant you invested real dollars and real effort into creating this. And that's why it stood out. Now, everyone has a digital camera on their phones and in their pockets. So anyone can create pictures that look exactly like that. And that's kind of the shift that we're gonna see with AI. If everyone is doing the same thing. Then you doing something authentic is going to stand out immediately. And that's where you wanna get to. That's what you wanna keep in mind as you, as you move forward with your your content plans and your ideas.
Those are the things, is this making me stand out? Is this authentic? Or could this have been posted by anyone? That's probably the main question you wanna ask as you're delivering your content and coming up with your strategies. And and think about outside of marketing. Well, outside of hospitality, not necessarily outside of marketing, but think about the things that you're already paying for from a marketing standpoint that are unique. Things uh people are already playing people are already paying premiums for signals like handmade, locally sourced, small batch, uh farm to table, because they imply human effort and authenticity.
So as synthetic output becomes abundant, real access, expertise, personality, and lived experience becomes much more valuable. And the best thing about this is hospitality is full of authentic material. You have employees, you have guests, you have neighborhoods, you have celebrations, events, business trips, weddings. These things are happening in your hotel all the time. These are authentic, real, lived moments that you can share and get people to connect with.
Brands sh hospitality brands right now should intentionally document these real experiences instead of training audiences to expect generic content. And here's a great example. One of our properties in New York City um initially gave us some pushback about a a reel that we did. And there's been a trend going around of just creating reels that have neighborhood sounds. So this Being in New York City, obviously we just posted raw uh raw video and raw audio more appropriately on top of some edited video of the neighborhood.
We wanted to showcase the the different sounds that you'll hear in this neighborhood as opposed to a neighborhood like Times Square. The where this hotel is located is more um more family friendly, a little more residential. So we wanted to showcase there's a different way to experience New York City. And we kept a real audio in the videos. You heard cars passing by, you did you heard some construction noise, you heard a couple taxis honking, but you also heard some birds in the park as we showed that part.
Um you heard people having lunch on the sidewalk and not a lot of loud music, etc. And initially There was a bit of hesitation from from the client because they were like expecting audio to be over it. Um, this perfectly curated experience. And we it the the piece of content performed very well. And we were able to show that see people are looking for authenticity. They're looking for those different things. And we don't want to give them an experience that they're not going to have.
When they get out of the subway and start walking towards a hotel, they're not gonna hear a Taylor Swift song. They may be singing it in their head, but that music's not gonna actually be playing. What they're gonna hear is everything we you just heard in that video. But that's what they're coming for. They're coming for that experience. They're coming for New York City and that story and to be part of this bigger dream that they've always had of being in New York City, things they've seen in movies, things they've seen in TV shows.
And that is part of the experience. So we don't want to cover things like that up. And that's um maybe an extreme example, but this is what I mean when we talk about not wanting to do synthetic content. We don't want to curate things too much. And if we go down the AI rabbit hole, everything about your post is going to be curated. We need to have majority, you need to have authentic Real experiences, real moments, things that people can see, feel and touch through their phones and through engaging with your piece of content. You want to evoke something in them. And that's not gonna come by giving them synthetic material.
